The Macon Incident
by SprayCanOfDoom
Summary: The only surviving crew member of the USCSS Macon, Conrad Jackson describes his experience aboard the ill-fated ship, and the exploratory contract from Seegson that led to its demise. A journey to sector KG-488 to discover the secrets it will forever hold in time. This is a full account of the Macon incident.


July 30th, 2246.

I am recording this audio logbook to document and testify my involvement in the crash and subsequent total loss of the United States commercial starship Macon. Under the jurisdiction of Sector Marshal John Sorenson of sector KG-488, this testimony is to be considered as Federal evidence for documentation of illegal Weyland-Yutani involvement that set in motion the events prescribed in this testimony. For case usage, refer to Weyland-Yutani v. United States Space Administration, case number 39-450081 in Federal Archival databases.

As of right now, at 3:27PM interplanetary standard time, I am the only surviving crew member of the USCSS Macon. My knowledge is limited towards how my crew mates perished, I can only solidly confirm the death of two of them, out of a total of nine crew that were lost aboard the Macon. The first, senior medical officer Xavier Richardson, was shot and killed aboard the Macon while attempting to-

…

Okay. Just start from the beginning?

…

Alright. My disclosure of the incident begins on December 25th, 2191.

On this date, we received a contract from the Seegson corporation while sitting in an easy orbit around the Norwich station in sector CM-209. We had just finished up a 10-year scrap haul contract a few weeks earlier, which we spent the majority of in hypersleep before delivery to that station. We weren't involved in the Chimera scrapper cleanup scandal, all we did was just haul the stuff to where we were told. I testified on that, too.

So we're sitting there in orbit, taking it easy, mostly enjoying ourselves and talking with family. Yang hosted a party for some television show anniversary, of all things. But hey, no one complained about the free beer and cake that came with attendance. I opened up our hauling services beacon while we were in no shape to ship out, mostly because we usually can't catch a contract unless the better ships are all on decade-long hauls. Not many jobs you can get with a decrepit Lockmart FJ-41G these days, I'll tell ya. Best to let people know you're available, at least.

However, almost a day after opening the beacon up, we get a contract out from Seegson. It's not very descriptive, extremely vague. Basically amounted to "go here and look around, report what you see". It involved a planetary landing, which the Macon wasn't built for, at least not in the state we had her. We could have purchased planetary thrusters and had them on faster than you could say "That's extremely expensive", but the contract wasn't paying even a third of the cost that would take, and we certainly weren't going to get comped planetary thrusters from a failing android manufacturer.

I talked with the contract manager at Seegson, got the planetary landing waived under the pretense that we'd take hi-res photos of the entire planet. Refused to talk about the actual contract, why it was sent out and everything though, did not want to say a single word about why the company wanted photos of an entire planet. I assumed they wanted to build a plant or mine out there, something I guess. At the time, the sector was uninhabited aside from a podunk Mom-and-Pop mining operation in a nearby asteroid field. Steel miners just trying to make a living, from what I saw.

The contract would take two decades to complete, hypersleep ten years to the sector, do our job, and hypersleep ten years back to the Norwich station to complete. Usually, we only do short contracts under the assumption that there'll be multiple contracts in succession, like scrap hauling jobs. Seegson didn't want to say anything, like I said though, so weighing the pros and cons, we all voted on taking the contract in interest of building a better "corporate portfolio", just to make us look better when bigger companies come across our work listing. My gut told me this was going to be the only contract we got from Seegson, though.

We refueled at Norwich and departed CM-209 on January 1st, 2192, a day after accepting the contract. Getting into hypersleep is never fun, so a couple of people stayed awake for a few more days during the journey before getting into their stasis chambers. I did this myself, I just wanted a few days to contemplate everything and get the travel log up to date. Before getting to deep-sleep though, I did talk to a friend a sector away in the Indiana station. I'm withholding their identity at their request, but they did tell me an interesting tidbit of information.

Seegson had been searching for someone to take that contract for years, specifically from Norwich for some reason. They had asked every ship, from huge Bison freighters, to even small Q-class tugboats, everyone near Norwich that put up a contract beacon got a request to take the contract.

Now, Norwich isn't a particularly active station. However, my station friend told me that surrounding sector's station passerby's never once received the contract request, including Indiana's. Usually, from my experience, when a company has a certain 'urgency' with getting a contract fulfilled, they try to get as many ships as possible to hear the call. All the sectors he mentioned in question were, more or less, the same distance from KG-488, as CM-209 was. All of them surpassed CM-209 in activity, too. But Seegson only ever tried to contract this job out of Norwich, which was frankly strange, to me at least. Everyone else was just glad to have steady employment once again.

KG-488 was the destination sector, by the way. Other than the podunk mining operation I mentioned, wasn't much more to say about it. Only one exoplanet, a huge ball of dirt, rock, and dust out in the middle of nowhere. The territory was officially within United States' jurisdiction, but the sector was part of a multi-sector area control program. It was territory five out of, I think, fourteen in the program. The program itself was run by a few Sector Marshals trying to cut expenses and resources dedicated to these unimportant sectors, just so the rest of these Marshals could go assist more active sectors in policing and management. So, you end up with a bunch of relatively unsupervised, uncared-for sectors with next to no-one around, not even a nearby station.

Except for long-range comms that take weeks to establish a usable connection, we were going in dark. Seegson mentioned we were more or less going to be on our own the whole time, venturing into unexplored regions that have last had eyes on them maybe once or twice during the 2080's territory race. The crew had been spreading around the usual tales of monsters and aliens that supposedly lurk in the dark, mysterious creatures seemingly out for human blood just waiting for a lonely ship to wander through and happen upon these cretins of deep space. It was all in jest, and no one was actually scared. I did end up reprimanding chief engineer Garth Simmons for taking the stuff a bit too far with our two female crew crew members, first assistant engineer Holly Dupont and chief cargo officer Charlotte Weber. Though, after everything that…

Too-, too far ahead to mention that now. As I was saying, we got into hypersleep and buckled down for our decade-long trip to this planet way out there.


End file.
